Driving from NJ

[Kevlar10]

We are planning a trip in the fall and also planning to drive for the first time. If anyone has driven from Northern NJ or nearby, what do you usually do? Leaving on a Sunday morning, hopefully by 4 AM. I think we can make it to southern GA or North FL before we stop for the night. The plan would then be to check in early at the resort and hit one of the parks. Is this realistic? I have no issues driving long distances, and I figure if we do an early Sunday start, the traffic won’t be bad. Any feedback is appreciated.

 

[xipotec]

Driving from LI was quite a chore. It will be better in NJ just cause you cut out Manhattan crossing.

I would be very careful on pushing too far, statistics say after 6 hours of driving you get very lazy.
So shoot for SC , that’s the best spot to stop. Watch you speed through SC and especially Georgia.

Florida part is longer than you will expect and traffic through the Jacksonville area can be bad at certain parts of the day.
you can definitely hit the parks the second s day, but you WILL be tired that night! It will be a short day also.

WDW hotels will take your luggage so you can go straight to the parks. Many off site hotels do this also.

 

[Rockette]

We are planning a trip in the fall and also planning to drive for the first time. If anyone has driven from Northern NJ or nearby, what do you usually do? Leaving on a Sunday morning, hopefully by 4 AM. I think we can make it to southern GA or North FL before we stop for the night. The plan would then be to check in early at the resort and hit one of the parks. Is this realistic? I have no issues driving long distances, and I figure if we do an early Sunday start, the traffic won’t be bad. Any feedback is appreciated.

Realistically you want to leave BEFORE that time to avoid rush hour in the DC metro area. Aiming to leave at 1 am is optimal to get past DC by 6 am. If you're a fast driver (set cruise at 80 mph), you can do it in 4 hours with no stops. As far as stopping overnight, you can vary where you want to do it. But the key thing to avoid getting tired is to get past the DC beltway before 6 o'clock.

 

[disneydreamer1980]

We drive from Maryland every year. We used to stop overnight in Georgia but now we drive straight thru (we have three drivers in the car so we take turns). We leave early on Friday morning (usually around 6) and drive thru til arrival around 9 at night and we check in to a cheap hotel near Disney and sleep. We get up early the next morning, refreshed and head to our Disney resort. Traffic around DC can be a pain and 95south is so monotonous but it’s really not that bad.

 

[Leigh L]

We are planning a trip in the fall and also planning to drive for the first time. If anyone has driven from Northern NJ or nearby, what do you usually do? Leaving on a Sunday morning, hopefully by 4 AM. I think we can make it to southern GA or North FL before we stop for the night. The plan would then be to check in early at the resort and hit one of the parks. Is this realistic? I have no issues driving long distances, and I figure if we do an early Sunday start, the traffic won’t be bad. Any feedback is appreciated.

Realistically you want to leave BEFORE that time to avoid rush hour in the DC metro area. Aiming to leave at 1 am is optimal to get past DC by 6 am. If you're a fast driver (set cruise at 80 mph), you can do it in 4 hours with no stops. As far as stopping overnight, you can vary where you want to do it. But the key thing to avoid getting tired is to get past the DC beltway before 6 o'clock.

DC morning traffic is a great point, but I think in the OP's case since it's a Sunday it shouldn't be too bad. In our experience, the problematic I-95 and I-495 traffic issues on Sundays are coming through DC during the late afternoon and evening traffic clusters.

We live just west of DC and frequently drive to southern NY on weekends (about an hour north of the city and it takes us about an hour to get to the Paterson/Clifton/Passaic exits on the Garden State on the ride home). During our trips, we almost always come home on Sunday mornings. We leave NY ideally around 8-9 a.m. so we can beat the Sunday night traffic.

One hot traffic spot on I-95 we always run in to (both north and southbound) is the stretch just south of Woodbridge Va (approaching Quantico) down to Fredericksburg, Va. We drove to Myrtle in 2017 on a Saturday morning and that was killer for both us and our NY friends who were about 2 hours behind us. Sunday might not be too bad though?

 

[rcj2000]

We did the drive from southern NY to Florida. It was me and my DH driving taking turns when one of us got tired. We left NYC area at 4:30am on a Saturday. We were crossing the GWB by 5:30am. We did hit some traffic in Maryland then again in NC due to construction. We spent the night in a hotel just outside Savannah GA. We arrived at Savannah around 8pm but we did make frequent stops. We left Savannah at 8:30am Sunday morning and arrived at Disney around 1pm. We also did this drive in the winter when we had less daylight driving hours.

 

[Dis703]

We tried doing the overnight trip once from NJ to FL and got stuck in major construction all night on 95 through Virginia. I'm sure there would have been a way to look that up somewhere I just never thought if it. Growing up we did the drive a lot back and forth from FL to NJ and then in reverse when we moved here. The worst of the traffic always seems to be the area around DC so avoiding that during rush hour is ideal.

I haven't driven it in a few years though since we found Frontier flights were so insanely cheap to Florida. Just throwing that out there in case cost is your reason for driving.

 

[java]

We usually go I81 PA to get south(I’m western N.J.) mileagewise it’s longer but no traffic. So it feels shorter. We usually leave around 3:30 and stop as far south in GA that we can. This trip( if we can still go) we will try to go further as we will have 4 drivers!

 

[Kevlar10]

Co

We tried doing the overnight trip once from NJ to FL and got stuck in major construction all night on 95 through Virginia. I'm sure there would have been a way to look that up somewhere I just never thought if it. Growing up we did the drive a lot back and forth from FL to NJ and then in reverse when we moved here. The worst of the traffic always seems to be the area around DC so avoiding that during rush hour is ideal.

I haven't driven it in a few years though since we found Frontier flights were so insanely cheap to Florida. Just throwing that out there in case cost is your reason for driving.

Cost isn’t the reason. For some reason, my wife now refuses to fly. Not because of COVID-19. We flew all of the time for years, but now she won’t.

 

[Disneyfan754321]

I was like we are still in the Carolinas... lol
We drive every year. I prefer to leave early saturday make stops along the way , you are not as beat down when you get there. Check out transportation board , for those fokes driving thread. People will tell you where to stop etc.